Entry Hoffnagle:1996:Pb from ibmsysj.bib

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BibTeX entry

@Article{Hoffnagle:1996:Pb,
  author =       "Gene F. Hoffnagle",
  title =        "Preface",
  journal =      j-IBM-SYS-J,
  volume =       "35",
  number =       "2",
  pages =        "122--123",
  year =         "1996",
  CODEN =        "IBMSA7",
  ISSN =         "0018-8670",
  bibdate =      "Thu Jan 09 09:28:44 1997",
  URL =          "http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj35-2.html#one",
  abstract =     "Issue Order No. G321-0124
                 \par
                 Objects, object-oriented techniques, and object
                 technology have altered the software development
                 landscape for software professionals and, more slowly,
                 altered the cost, quality, and timeliness of modified
                 and new systems for users and customers. Objects are
                 the latest and most effective means so far for creating
                 software that is easy to develop, relatively
                 error-free, portable, reusable, and serves as a
                 continually evolving platform for yet more advanced
                 software capabilities.
                 \par
                 This issue contains an introductory essay on the
                 evolution of object technology, six papers on various
                 facets of object technology and its use, and a
                 technical note on supertypes and subjects. We are
                 indebted to J. R. Babb of the IBM Software Solutions
                 Division in Somers, New York, for his contributions to
                 the early planning and coordination of this issue and
                 to G. Radin of the IBM Research Division in Yorktown
                 Heights, New York, for his noteworthy efforts in
                 coordinating and developing this issue.
                 \par
                 The existence of object technology owes much to a long
                 line of preceding technologies that evolved into what
                 we see and use today. Object technology represents the
                 latest and best approach to achieving software
                 productivity, quality, maintainability, reuse, and
                 effective development. Radin, in an introductory essay,
                 describes aspects of object technology that demonstrate
                 its power for software development and developers,
                 while reflecting on the historical precedents and
                 evolutionary trail.
                 \par
                 The ability to create information systems that serve
                 enterprises depends on both an inside view of those
                 systems, such as is supplied by architecture and
                 engineering, and an outside or user view. As McDavid
                 shows in his paper, this outside view is fundamentally
                 dependent on an understanding of the enterprise as an
                 information system, communicating through
                 domain-specific languages. The result is business
                 language analysis. The effect is improvement in the
                 link between the application domain (the enterprise)
                 and domain-sensitive object technologies.
                 \par
                 Budinsky et al. provide the architecture for and a
                 description of a software tool for automatic
                 translation of object-oriented design patterns into
                 code, based on design patterns taken from the current
                 literature on the subject. The architecture emphasizes
                 speed of tool development and enhancement, flexibility
                 in adding and changing functions, ease of specification
                 of the design-to-code translations, and ease of use of
                 the tool and its results, among other goals. The tool
                 is new and much remains to be learned from users and
                 incorporated from the ever-expanding breadth and depth
                 of design patterns.
                 \par
                 The storage of application data in one or more of the
                 many database management systems has become problematic
                 for the application programmer and is the subject of a
                 paper by Reinwald et al. The authors present a shared
                 memory-resident cache as an extension to IBM's DB2*
                 Common Server for AIX* that provides a means for
                 storing objects within a relational database management
                 system. While a number of types of data are discussed,
                 the paper uses C++ objects as an example of how common
                 data storage can be achieved without affecting the
                 underlying objects.
                 \par
                 Benantar, Blakley, and Nadalin explore the requirements
                 for and architecture of the run-time Object Security
                 Service (OSS), a part of IBM's Distributed SOM (System
                 Object Model) environment. OSS handles authentication,
                 authorization, client/server association, and other
                 security functions, while taking advantage of existing
                 security mechanisms. OSS provides these services to end
                 users and application developers transparently,
                 seamlessly, and independently of other underlying and
                 coexisting services.
                 \par
                 One difficulty in achieving high-quality software is
                 the lack of software metrics that can be viewed in real
                 time, as the software is being developed. Burbeck
                 approaches this problem in the broad context of general
                 real-time metrics and then in the specific context of
                 complexity metrics for object-oriented software
                 development in Smalltalk. The author searches out
                 metrics that can be readily determined from code and
                 are measurable in real time, resulting in seven
                 complexity metrics. Advice is given regarding the
                 value and use of these metrics in practice.
                 \par
                 Davis, Grimes, and Knoles address the technological
                 response to the need for international use of text in
                 global applications that have only one physical,
                 binary form. They further consider the localization
                 aspects (language, time, date formats, etc.) that
                 must be adequately handled by these global
                 applications. Their context for discussion is the
                 globalization features of Taligent's CommonPoint**
                 application system for development of documents and
                 object-oriented applications, and the Unicode**
                 international character encoding standard.
                 \par
                 In a technical note, Harrison et al. describe their
                 recent work on combining the capabilities of dynamic
                 supertypes and subjects (from subject-oriented
                 programming) that they have separately
                 developed. This first look at the combination shows
                 how specification and development of object-oriented
                 software would be enhanced, especially for large,
                 complex systems. The combined approach is intended to
                 provide a natural way to encompass the entire
                 software development life cycle.
                 \par
                 The next issue of the Journal will be a special
                 double issue (Volume 35, Numbers 3 and 4 as one
                 issue) on the current projects of the Massachusetts
                 Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab, famous for
                 its work on multimedia and now exploring many new
                 fields of future-oriented computerization.",
  acknowledgement = ack-nhfb,
}

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